Colonial Williamsburg
When America's Largest Living Museum Needed a Digital Makeover, History Met Innovation.
Overview
Colonial Williamsburg isn't your average tourist attraction. Spanning over 300 acres, it's America's largest outdoor living museum, where historical interpreters in period clothing bring the 18th century vividly to life through everything from wool spinning to musket demonstrations.
Key Points
- 4 Key Activities distilled from a complex visitor experience (Explore, Visit, Learn, Give)
- 300+ Acres worth of historical experiences translated to pixels and code
- Dozens of daily hands-on experiences made discoverable online
- Thousands of events wrangled into one actually-usable calendar
Problem
How Do You Digitize History Without Losing Its Soul?
When you're Colonial Williamsburg, your product is literally stepping back in time – feeling the weight of a blacksmith's hammer, smelling fresh bread from the bakery, and watching historical figures debate the revolution. How do you possibly translate that rich, multi-sensory experience to a screen?
The foundation's digital presence wasn't doing justice to their physical one. Their website struggled to showcase the sheer breadth of offerings – from hands-on colonial craft classes to museum collections. Thousands of daily activities needed organization, and their treasure trove of historical content (articles, research papers, artifacts) lay largely unaccessed.
Visitors planning trips faced an overly complicated maze with what was available online. Meanwhile, educational resources that could bring history alive for students and researchers stayed buried in the digital equivalent of an unsorted archive drawer.
Solution
Making Digital History Feel Almost As Good As Being There
In early 2018, we began collaborating with Colonial Williamsburg to reimagine their digital experience. We approached the project with a reverence for history paired with forward-thinking design principles.
Navigation That Makes Sense
By focusing on what visitors actually come to the website for – Explore, Visit, Learn, and Give – we created a classic yet simple navigation that cut through the complexity. Sometimes the most revolutionary ideas are the simplest ones!
A Design System Worthy of a Revolution
We developed a visual language that felt authentic without looking like it was designed on the period’s parchment paper. We used colors and textures of the physical location to create "wax seal" shapes and period-appropriate design elements.
Stories That Actually Feel Like Stories
We created interactive timelines and digital experiences that brought pivotal moments like the Stamp Act to life, complete with events, dates, and artifacts – all presented in the style of 18th-century periodicals.
Results
Bringing Colonial Williamsburg to Digital Life
Our partnership delivered a digital experience that honored the foundation's historical significance while making it accessible to modern audiences on modern devices.
Digital Storytelling That Doesn't Put You to Sleep
We designed interactive experiences that make a 240-year-old historical event feel fresh and engaging. The Stamp Act timeline became more than just dates and facts – now it existed as a compelling narrative that visitors could explore at their own pace.
A Calendar That Works
We condensed thousands of events, times, and activities into one user-friendly calendar system. Gone were the days of endless scrolling and clicking just to figure out when the next musket demonstration would happen. Visitors could now easily plan their day, and staff could manage it all quickly.
A Behind-the-Scenes Revolution
The project prompted Colonial Williamsburg to take a hard look at their internal processes and customer pain points. The result? Streamlined operations, improved content management, and better digital workflows that matched how their teams actually worked.
Modern Tech with a Historical Soul
The visual design system managed to pull off something tricky: feeling authentically Colonial Williamsburg while working well on smartphones and laptops. This wasn't just a visual facelift but a thoughtful translation of a historical brand into the digital age.
Takeaway
When Old Meets New, Good Things Happen
Throughout our multi-year engagement, we walked a careful line between respecting meticulously researched historical content and creating practical digital experiences for modern visitors. This wasn't just about building a website – it was about translating centuries of American history into something you could access with your thumb.
"Working with Mobelux, our organization was able to give careful, thoughtful consideration to the customer experience and how we want to tell our stories."
